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13 THE FALL of 1935 slipped quickly into winter. I enjoyed working in the warm lab, with snow swirling by the big windows just beyond my table. But by spring the yearning to get into the field again yanked at me. I had worked long and hard and faithfully on the Howe Quarry material, and all ofit was interesting. But the fact it was all from my big adventure made the call of the wild even stronger. Otto Falkenbach had developed a few bones from the Howe Quarry, including a complete skull, but the rest had fallen on me. Brown had hoped to increase the lab force to speed up work on this collection, but, as with other things, we lacked the fmancial means to do so. One morning on the way to the museum, just as the trees along Seventy-Seventh Street were tentatively testing their new season's buds, I ran into Brown. "It would be great to be getting ready for a trip back to Wyoming," I said to him wistfully. Brown smiled. "I agree, R. T.," he said. "But it looks like another season without an expedition west." The thought was depressing. Manhattan, glamorous and artifIcial, was pleasant if taken in small doses, but I rebelled against another summer like the last. I had read of Triassic outcrops in New England . IfI couldn't go west, maybe I could get to do dinosaur-hunting around here. Though I didn't talk this over with Brown, I thought a visit to the museum library might be in order. Taking out several books on local geology, I made the fascinating discovery that the Palisades, in New Jersey just across the Hudson, were old Triassic intrusions. The next Sunday I walked across George Washington Bridge to have a look at them up close. A dark grey basaltic rock, hard and dense, met my inquisitive eye. Here an ancient lava flow had forced its way into beds of sedimentary rocks and hardened. 75 I climbed down to the base of the cliff, where the Hudson ripples along a thin red outcrop of red sandstone, where tides rise and fall twice a day. The red sandstone, too, was Triassic, about two hundred million years old. The exposure was limited, but it represented muds laid down at the same time as those of the Painted Desert of Arizona. I followed south in excited search for bones or tracks; it was thrilling to reflect that here, almost in the shade ofthe Empire State Building, were rocks that might carry dinosaur remains. But they disappeared under the Fort Lee Ferry docks. I found nothing in the hard, sandy band of red sandstone, but I was out scouting again outside the great, wonderful, incredible, fascinating, confining stone barn of the American Museum. Next day I investigated a partial skeleton stored in the museum, a skeleton collected from these very exposures in 1912, a phytosaur. The creature, resembling a crocodile, would have been some twelve to fourteen feet in length. He was neither a dinosaur nor a crocodile but possessed affinities to both. Nearly half the bones of the museum specimen were present and complete, prepared with the readily recognizable red sandstone matrix against which the pinkish white chalky bones showed up well. I looked it over carefully, knowing it would probably be typical of any bones found in the eastern Triassic. Continuing my study of regional geology, I learned there was a considerable territory up in the Connecticut River Valley, extending all the way up to Turners Falls, Massachusetts, that was Triassic in age. Lull's Triassic Life ofthe Connecticut Valley revealed that dinosaur tracks and occasional scattered bones and parts of skeletons had long been known in places about the valley. I went to see Brown in his offlCe. "Why can't I go up into Massachusetts and Connecticut and do a little local fossil-hunting, since we can't go out west? Mostly, I can go by streetcar. " He looked pleased. "Who says you can't? Sounds good to me." He spoke enthusiastically. "We could use a slab of trackway from Connecticut Triassic; it would look good on the ambulatory leading to Jurassic Hall. " The wall of which he spoke was part of the new Roosevelt Memorial Wing just completed. The flat white expanse was ideal to display great slabs of rock showing dinosaur trails. "I've had this thing in mind for some time," Brown said. "After we pick up some New...

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